Category: Legal History
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How to Prove Mental Illness in the Eyes of the Court
By Eunice Lee — Kahler v. Kansas, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court on March 23, 2020, ruled that the Due Process Clause does not require Kansas to adopt an insanity test that aims to understand a defendant’s ability to…
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Originalism and Jury Nullification in America: A Legal Basis for the Restoration of a Lost Right
By Lawson Wright — A peal of alarm bells shattered the brisk yet tranquil Saturday morning in Boston on February 15, 1851. A mob had stormed the local courthouse in an effort to rescue fugitive slave Shadrach Minkins from being…
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Man v. Machine: Social and Legal Implications of Machine Translation
By Cecilia Quirk — In a predominantly English-speaking country such as the United States, it can be easy to take for granted the essential relationship between the arts of law and translation. Yet, as David Bellos notes in Is That…
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How Long Will China’s Animal Cruelty Laws Have to Wait?
By Leyuan Ma — In April 2020, a university student in China’s Shandong Province was expelled from school after videos of him mercilessly torturing and murdering over 80 stray cats surfaced on the Chinese internet; in October of the same…
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The Supreme Court’s Perversion of Property Rights
By Beck Reiferson — Political philosophers have long regarded the right to property as one of man’s most essential rights. John Locke, whose writings were among the most influential on the political thought of America’s Framers, believed the primary purpose…
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El Salvador’s Bitcoin Law: Contemporary Implications of Forced Tender Legislation
By Cecilia Quirk — From the invention of paper money in 7th century China to the FDR administration’s decision to drop the gold standard in 1933, money has constantly evolved in unexpected, even unsettling ways. Just as a world without…
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The Gender Dichotomy: How Sharia Law in the Seventh Century Granted Women Legal Empowerment
By Noura Shoukfeh — The world’s youngest major religion, Islam, was established in the seventh century when the Prophet Muhammad amassed a following dedicated to the revelations he recieved in the Qur’an. The growth of Islam in the decades after…
